Podesta to work on energy, climate

John Podesta may not limit his efforts to only the marquee energy and climate-change tasks when he returns to the Obama administration.

The White House has said energy and climate policy would be a particular focus for Podesta during his one-year stint as counsel, and he won’t weigh in on the Keystone XL pipeline decision — perhaps the highest-profile energy issue in front of the administration — but Podesta may delve into the lower tier but no less consequential items.

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Podesta isn’t yet granting interviews about his new White House role and few details have emerged from administration officials. But by looking at the issues he’s worked on in the past, it opens a window on topics he may take on over the next year.

That includes efforts to phase out pollutants such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), addressing methane emissions, setting a strategy for international climate-change talks and pressing for new policies to develop clean energy.

The former chief of staff to Bill Clinton lobbied senior administration officials ahead of a deal the White House reached with China this summer to phase down HFCs, a short-lived substance used in refrigerators and air conditioners that is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

In June, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached an accord and later expanded to a group under the Montreal Protocol treaty, and now the task at hand is to get a broader agreement among the G-20 nations by next October’s meeting. The big holdout is India, and Podesta may be influential in making progress there.

“I would expect that the HFC phaseout to be a key goal of John’s work,” said Paul Bledsoe, who served with Podesta in the Clinton administration and is now a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “He’s very knowledgeable about the whole suite of short-lived climate pollutants.”

That includes methane — a highly potent greenhouse gas that is at the heart of the debate over the use of hydraulic fracturing to tap into the nation’s shale gas fields.

Podesta worked with Andrew Light on methane emissions while at the Center for American Progress, and the two authored a POLITICO op-ed in February last year praising a deal agreed to by the U.S., Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico and Sweden. Light subsequently joined the State Department in October as a special envoy on climate change, including U.S.-India bilateral relations on climate and clean energy and reducing HFCs, methane and black carbon.

And Podesta may join Light and fellow CAP alum Todd Stern — now the State Department’s chief international climate negotiator — in helping determine the U.S.’s negotiating strategy in the run-up to a crucial United Nations climate gathering in Paris in 2015.

More broadly, Podesta’s job ostensibly will be to help ensure the president’s climate program progresses more smoothly than the troubled rollout of his signature health care law.

His return to the White House is the latest evidence of the organizational strategy Obama has used since his earliest days as president: develop an exclusive inner circle to help him make the meatiest policy decisions and coordinate their rollout among his agencies and departments.

“The climate issue is one that’s dispersed across several White House offices and Cabinet agencies, so delivering on the president’s climate agenda requires a strong coordinating hand in the White House,” said Elliot Diringer, a former Clinton administration environmental official and now executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “And John certainly is capable of taking on that role.”

Podesta has been vocal in calling for the White House to be more active in taking the lead on climate change, and he opined to POLITICO early this year that Obama would need to marshal all the forces in the administration.

“I think the second term calls for somewhat of a different strategy,” he said in January. “There’s huge potential, huge authority and that’s going to require leadership execution. And I see that as coming from the White House as opposed to just kind of letting each agency kind of figure out what to do.”